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  • life – wikified

    After a few false starts I’ve started up my own personal wiki. In the end I decided that MoinMoin would be the best choice for me, since it is fairly small and simple. TikiWiki was interesting, but just way too much for a small personal wiki. Now I just need to make some themes. to make it fit in with the rest of my site. Anyways, you can get there via the link on the left, or by clicking here.

    There really isn’t that much in there yet. But I’m planning to use it for random information I want to keep track of. And if you want to contribute at all just let me know (everyone has read permission unless I grant them more).

  • More Proof That iTunes Reads Minds

    I just fired up iTunes because I wanted to listen to some music, but also wanted to hear one song in particular first. So I hit shuffle and then searched for the song. The scroll bar barely moved and I noticed that it was the second song in the shuffle. Coincidence? I think not.

  • Do They Know About CD-Rs?

    C.Net has an article about Longhorn putting the squeeze on gadgets

    SAN FRANCISCO–Windows makes it easy to quickly download files to iPods and other portable storage devices–a little too easy in the minds of many IT managers.

    In the next version of Windows, Microsoft will give big companies an easy way to block use of such devices, while making it easier for consumers to connect their home systems to them, a company representative told CNET News.com.

    Much has been made of the security risks posed by portable storage devices known as USB keys, or flash drives, music players like the iPod, and other small gadgets that can store vast amounts of data. Some fear that such tiny devices can be used to quickly copy sensitive data off business PC hard drives, or to introduce malicious software onto corporate networks.

    “It’s a real problem,” said Padmanand Warrier, a developer in Microsoft’s Windows unit. “That’s the feedback we’ve gotten from IT folks.” [C.NET News]

    I know things like USB drives make it a little easier, but anyplace I’ve worked it was easy to get a cd burning for your machine. Or for smaller things a floppy drive. And telling people they can’t use a cd burning is akin to stopping them from ever doing any effective work.

  • More People Gasping For Breath

    Given my issues with my own lungs, I’m always keeping my ears out for news stories about them. The scary part is that I can see this leading to more people getting things like IPF earlier in life. Not something I’d wish on anyone.

    Pollution’s Long-Term Effects on Pre-Teens’ Lungs

    A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine this week indicates that current levels of air pollution have chronic adverse effects on lung development in children aged 10 to 18. The large study’s authors conclude that the exposure leads to clinically significant deficits in adult lung function. NPR’s Richard Harris reports. [via NPR News: Health & Science]

  • LiveJournal Grammar

    LiveJournal has some pages with advice on writing, including a whole page on the correct use of Homonyms, though I think their examples are actually Homophones. [via Waxy.org Links]

  • Someone I Want to Hurt

    The person who decided that DVDs need to be shrink-wrapped AND have a sticker on every side.

  • Movable Type 3.1 Released

    The fine folks at Six Apart have officially released Movable Type 3.1. I’ve been beta testing this for a bit over a week and it’s pretty nice. They also released a pack of plugins for it that includes MT-Blacklist.

  • I wonder if the is the Infocom one

    Radio 4 is re-releasing an old Hitchhikers game.

    Radio 4 revives Hitchhiker’s game

    A Douglas Adams game is revived to mark a new Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy radio series.
    [BBC News | TECHNOLOGY]

    I really do wonder if this is the old Infocom game. I’ll need to find some of that not tea I guess.

  • Movable Type 3.1: Dynamic Templates

    One of the cool new things in Movable Type 3.1 (which should be out pretty damn soon now) is the dynamic PHP publishing. Why is this a big thing? Because up till now if you’d changed a something like your individual archive page template you’d have to go back and rebuild your whole site. If you’ve got a large number of posts this tends to take a while. Now, it can just render the page when requested, which means doing a pushlish all will go much faster.

    After a few rough starts, I got the whole thing running on this blog. The index page and the feeds are all static, but any archive page is built up on the fly. And you can even turn on a caching if you so desire. When you do this, a copy of the dynamic page is kept around for an hour so that if someone else visits that page again within the hour it doesn’t have to rebuild it again from the database.

    Setup for this feature was actually much easier than I thought, once you know a few things. One, it doesn’t work if you are using Berkeley DB as your database. Which required me to convert to using mySQL. Which worked out okay overall, but I had to do a bit of tweaking since I seemed to have some odd corruption in my database. Once that was done I just had to turn on the dynamic publishing for the templates I wanted and create a templates_c directory in my blog’s home directory. One republish later and everything was working just fine. It’s pretty much transparent to the person browsing the site (which means your existing permalinks won’t change at all.

    It also lets you do caching of the dynamicly generated pages via the Smarty template engine. If you turn it on, dynamicly generated pages are cached for an hour by default (though you can tweak that if you need to). Pretty slick. While my site doesn’t generate a ton of traffic, this is the kind of thing that could really be useful for a site that gets tons of hits a day.

    One or two other gotchas. If you are using PHP you can’t use opening tags in the format <?, you need to have them in the format <?php. As long as you do that you shouldn’t have any issues. Also, this is supposedly not compatible with any other plugins (not an issue for me as I don’t use any other plugins).

    Another issue is how dynamic pages are built. I tend to do my template editing locally using cyberduck+subethaedit and I have my templates linked to a local file on my web server. I find it is much easier to edit them that way. The problem with this is that if you make a change to the local file, you need to go back into MT and save it there also for it to take affect. I personally think it should make a check to see if the file version has changed and load that one in if so.

    Next thing to try: doing more with categories and sub-categories (You can see a bit of a preview to the right).

  • Skype for OS X

    Skype is now available for OS X (It’s been out for Windows for a while). Anyone I know using it? Drop me a line and let me know so I can add you. [via Joi Ito]